Securing the Future of the United Nations

A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, Report of the High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (New York: United Nations Department of Public Information, 2004). 129 pages. Available free at <http://www.un.org/secureworld/report2.pdf>.

On Dec. 2, 2004, the United Nations High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change released its long-anticipated final report. Its mandate, much broader than that of the earlier Panel on U.N. Peace Operations chaired by Lakhdar Brahimi, grew out of a sense of crisis that has enveloped the United Nations since the Security Council declined to authorize the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and since a truck bomb killed 21 members of the U.N. team in Iraq, including its leader, Sergio Vieira de Mello, the following August. The 16-member panel, appointed by Secretary General Kofi Annan that November, comprised a cross-section of former U.N. agency heads and ex-government ministers and advisers, chaired by Anand Panyarachun, the former foreign minister of Thailand.

The panel was free to focus on what it considered the most important threats to international security and the institutions created to maintain it. In doing so, however, it did not forget that states consist of people and that human security—health, safety and livelihood—is neglected only at our individual and collective peril.

As it was not a state-driven entity, the panel's report had to derive its initial momentum from the force of its evidence and arguments. Fortunately, the report, created with the support of an international research team, keeps the hortatory boilerplate to a minimum in a text that is highly readable yet thoroughly political, in the sense that it pushes the political envelope while trying not to pierce it.

Every government will, as a result, find something to embrace and something to hate, giving U.N. members sufficient grist to grind out a bargain with net benefits for all. This is possible if all members are willing to compromise; of course, compromise has not been a strong suit of the Bush White House or the present leadership of Congress. Nevertheless, much of what the report recommends to confront or control emerging diseases, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), terrorism and organized crime plays directly to U.S. interests, as do its recommendations about strengthening the United Nations itself.

In the sections on biological threats, the panel stresses the need to improve local and national public health systems in developing countries, both because sick populations remain mired in poverty and because bad disease surveillance and reporting anywhere limit everyone's ability to recognize and contain both bioterrorism and outbreaks of novel but natural pathogens like SARS. More controversially, the panel argues for Security Council-mandated quarantines if local or national governments fail to implement needed containment measures and for tripling current funding to combat HIV/AIDS, which is presently gutting public service sectors in many African states.

On WMD, the panel warns that the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime may collapse without vigorous reinforcement. The NPT needs strengthening to ensure that current nuclear weapon states downgrade the importance of nuclear weapons in their national strategies by ratifying the comprehensive test ban treaty (CTB), for example, or by taking seriously their NPT obligation to forego nuclear weapons entirely. The panel urges that existing stocks of nuclear and radiological materials be better guarded and that highly enriched uranium be "down-blended" into fuels not usable in weapons; that there be a time-limited moratorium on fissile material production and spent fuel reprocessing while a fissile material production cutoff agreement is negotiated; and that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) manage a central "market" of fissile material for civilian nuclear users and implement much more stringent inspections. These are useful and needed initiatives, but the proposed fissile material market requires that Washington trust the IAEA, which it at present considers a little too independent-minded. Furthermore, the materials cutoff has been on...